Time Warner Increases Internet Speeds

Time Warner is serving up faster internet speeds to close out 2012, as competitive pressures continue to squeeze the cable and broadband provider.

The Time Warner Standard Internet tier now offers download speeds up to 15 Mbps, up from 10 Mbps previously. Time Warner is claiming the 50% increase is free to all customers with this service tier (technically true), but they did hit up all of their customers with a new modem fee just a month ago. The lease fee of around $4 a month hits all customers unless they decide to purchase their own device – costing anywhere from $50 to $150 up front.

The increased speeds are available nationwide, though the upgrade is happening one Time Warner region at a time. Customers can simply his the “reset” button on their modem, or unplug it for about 10 seconds – the upgraded speed should kick in at that point.

The increased speeds should help Time Warner customers when it comes to bandwidth intensive activities like streaming video. A recent Netflix blog post placed Time Warner 7th among major ISPs when it comes to the average speed of Netflix streams. Up and comer Google fiber placed first, but their service is only now being deployed, and only in certain areas of Kansas City. Verizon FiOS topped all other broadband providers, edging out Charter and Comcast.

TWC has been working to upgrade speeds in major regions, offering their Wideband internet product in certain New York and Los Angeles markets. Now called Ultimate internet, the offered speed is 50 Mbps, but recent users in Kansas City have reported getting speeds up to 100 Mbps. Undoubtedly competitive pressure from the new Google Fiber project have forced TWC to put their best foot forward in this area.

I wish TWC had competition in my town. Quality of service is unbelievably poor and the 5mbps increase really doesn’t make a difference because the uplink is a mere 1mbps, coupled with the longest latency I’ve ever experienced from any ISP and the 172ms ping time, network requests hang for quite some time before the remote server receives the request. By the time the server responds to the request, it would take a lot more than 15mbps to fire back data fast enough to compensate for the long requests. That, plus it’s 2013. 15mbps is SLOOOWWW